25 Need-to-Know Strategy Tools

22

Disruptive technologies (Christensen)

This tool will help you:

• Be wary of the inferior offering of a new competitor, which may have a single, attractive attribute sufficient to gain a beachhead
• Understand that, as the competitor improves performance and reduces cost, your market could be usurped
• Acknowledge the dilemma and invest in the lesser, disruptive technology, thereby cannibalising your existing, superior technology

About this tool

Great firms can fail by doing everything right.

All is going fine, then along comes a new technology, usually of inferior, seemingly retrogressive quality and hence resisted, even disparaged, by the firm and by its customers, and all is disrupted – says Clayton Christensen.

Christensen’s 1997 book, ...